With a single crisp nod to Hall Mistress Soran and Seyun, Ilyra and Bel Sar stepped off the southern boulder lip and plunged straight down the steep shale avalanche chute below the ridge. They didn’t take the winding hairpin bends of the cart-track. There, the four-foot white crescent was already rounding the second turn with a high, whistling scream. They dropped directly down the forty-five-degree gully of loose black scree and frozen snow that cut across the chord of the switchbacks.
Seyun watched them go from the southern lip of the dark rock recess. He saw two lifetime masters of valley terrain moving in their native element. Ilyra didn’t run down the forty-five-degree scree with long, jarring strides that would have snapped an ankle. She glided on the heels of her boots in White Heron Hall’s Reed-on-Flood-Water slide. She used the butt of her ash-shafted spear as a light rudder behind her hip to skim over buried boulders and drop twenty feet of height with every bound.
Half a stride to her left, fifty-year-old Bel Sar rode the loose shale like a river poleman shooting a timber chute in spring flood. His knees deeply bent, his heavy wool coat flying behind him. The iron-shod butt of his hemp-bound Ash Reed staff planted behind his right heel to brake and steer through the flying gravel. Within five heartbeats, their dark silhouettes had dropped a hundred yards below the ridge under-road drain, racing the white glare of the dropping crescent toward the…
